Based on material from his forthcoming book, Learning to Dance with Spiders, this shocking session will show you how to stop turning into a cold intellectual automaton with long spindly fingers and heart in your head.

“Your mobile phone need not serve as your alarm clock beside your bed as you also text before sleep and check in to Twitter as soon as you wake up. Sleep is such a fundamental process in our lives. But sleep begins when we enter our bedroom, when we begin the process of settling down for the night. Sleep restores us. Our dreams help us resolve the day, and ‘work through’ restlessness in our dream life.”

“Sleep restores body and mind. We’ll take into our sleep the spidery-fingertip activity of texting and micro-blogging if it is the last thing we do at night. It is well reported that computer gamers see the after image of games in their visual space of closed eyes when they try to sleep for the night. They still see the movement of the boom boom or zap zap of the gun. In the very first days of computer games, when Pong was the rage – a game of virtual and simple tennis – addicted gamers couldn’t get the image of the little moving white dot out of their minds as they lay down for a nights’ sleep. This interferes with this vital human process. It is far healthier to clear the decks before sleep, to spend half an hour without such interruptions, to turn to our partner (if we have one) and share a goodnight with them. It can be healthy to listen to the sounds of the night outside through a small open window, or wind down to some relaxing music, to play back the day in our thoughts gently, or to just tune into our breathing as we relax into tiredness.”

Paul levy will be leading a session on this topic at Caffe Moksha as part of The Critical Incident 2012; Brighton, Sussex, England, on Sunday 17th June.

Now in it’s ninth year, this event takes place at the Phoenix Gallery and Caffe Moksha. There are over 20 workshops, discussions, talks, performances and experiments in creativity, artistry and change.